Sunday, December 14, 2008

APPARENTLY there is a contest that some important computer people are having that involves completing the last line of an xkcd comic. Here it is:

Click it for a link to the site with the rules and stuff. The deadline is in like three days so enter, enter enter! How cool would it be if one of us won? It would be very cool, is the answer.

Comment with any ideas you think of / submit officially. I shall choose my own winner who shall win Fame and Pride and nothing else.

And if one of you gets to be a finalist I will work my ass off to get you thousands and thousands of votes so you win.

My ideas:"I'm trying to figure out if your bitchiness is genetic.""I wanted to tell her you were pregnant. By the way, you're pregnant.""Why the hell isn't my hat black?""Oh, nothing...just warning her that her daughter's funeral was scheduled for next thursday...""AH WAS PROGRAMMMMIN' IN PYTHON!! PS WE HAVE QUIRKY SEX""Did you know that the Palm company makes thousands of high quality technology products, all available on their website, www.palm.com? It's true!""To remind her, once again, that you're the stupider sibling.""Because the current state of mobile communications is....adequate."

Eh, these aren't all so good. I like #5. What do you guys have?

update: I forgot to write about how utterly stupid this whole thing is. How uncharacteristic of me. But yeah - the comic is basically finished as is, with no added punchline (and is actually better than most of the current comics). It is really, really difficult to imagine a winner to this contest that actually adheres to the rules being even vaguely amusing:

--It "may not be offensive" according to the details, yet it is fundamentally a your-mom joke. Good luck.--You can't "invade upon the publicity rights or privacy of any person or otherwise infringe upon any person’s or entity’s intellectual property, personal or proprietary rights" so throw all those ghostbusters references out the window.--"Use of the Palm logo or any intellectual property owned by or licensed to Palm is prohibited" and they're the freaking company sponsoring the contest.--Most limiting of all, "it should convey...something about the state of mobile communications." Woo, lots of room for some kind of cell-phones-give-you-cancer joke, I guess.

And of course you need to have this HILARIOUS PUNCHLINE appeal to the judges that Palm hires.

(incidentally I did send in my maximum allowed number of entries, namely one, and I tried to make it actually fit their guidelines to actually try to win. But it's so stupid I am not going to write it here.)

Clearly, this contest is destined for total and utter failure, and I am very excited for it.

I tried to come up with something, but I guess I'm not feeling too inspired right now. I do kind of like how one of the criteria is "relevance to the broader Palm community", though. Does anyone actually self-identify as a "member of the Palm community"?

Also this is really nitpicky but did anyone else notice white hat guy's little finger gesture in panel four? Randall does this a lot, when one of his characters says the punchline, and it really bothers me for some reason. You don't need to point to your joke Randall, it's obvious enough already.

Jay - I think that is his "in fact" gesture, no? Or sometimes more of an "uhmmmmm wait a minute." It doesn't really bother me but maybe now it will because I never thought of it as a "point to your joke" gesture. But isn't it sort of like the arms-above-head implies excitement?

I cannot think of anything, maybe I should just submit my captcha: reemichi.

"Why is my mom 80% of your recent phone calls?""REEMICHI!"

--

Okay apparently I entered the captcha wrong or something because now it is giving me "trolygli."

argh now in addition to being freaked out by amanda's observation that half the time the character's heads are floating above their bodies I'm going to start noticing this, too. soon xkcd will be nothing but a jumble of tiny drawing idiosyncrasies, and it will drive me mad. Well, madder.

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

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